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A Complex Beautiful Mesh Of Virtual Reality & Tech To Simplify Complexities Of Real Life - IMRAN™
Do you remember the movie Minority Report? Do you remember the days when airline travel was actually fun? Do you want to experience lots of things without danger or going broke?
All those things are coming together. Read on. I enjoyed a great article “Microsoft just revealed the future of Teams (You may love it, airlines won't)” by Chris Matyszczyk in ZDNet. Bad puns and tongue in cheek opinions on serious topics are what I am addicted to as well. 😉
I love technology, including Microsoft Teams that this article mentioned. (Full disclosure, my current {non-sales} day job is with helping global banks do modern work and collaboration using Teams and new tech). Microsoft just demoed some revolutionary new tools enabling holograms and VR to be used in real life and work. Then you’ll love Microsoft Mesh.
I have loved flying since my first trip as a solo-child traveler, at age 7 in Pakistan. And I have been a 3D & VR fan (View Master got me hooked on it) since childhood too.
Every year (except during the pandemic of course) I am able to fly airlines more and more but enjoy it less and less. Here’s why.
I LOVE the “flying in the air, looking out the window” part. I often ABHOR the “sitting in the plane as an airline passenger” part. IMHO, the biggest enemies of the joys of flying have been... drum roll... the airlines themselves.
So when my beloved technologies like computing, networking, software, user interfaces, and virtual reality converge it is a beautiful thing. If futuristic “Minority Report” type technology takes the "necessity of business" part out of airline travel, it is something I celebrate.
I bet I would travel a lot more — even at my own expense — if airlines became sources of unique, great, comfortable, fun customer experiences instead of learning how a UPS package feels packed on a truck. If only airlines learn the lesson that eventually all painful user experiences are replaced by alternates, and it’s their turn next. Maybe they will understand that the only way to survive is to provide customers such great experiences that they are willing to pay for it by choice, not necessity.
Check out youtu.be/Jd2GK0qDtRg . What do you think?
Imran Anwar
© 2021 IMRAN™
ZDnet article: www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-just-revealed-the-future-... .
#tech #technology #engineering #software #VR #3D #flying #writing #travel #Microsoft #Teams #ViewMaster #holographic #HoloLens
Impression from the former compressed air plant of the coal mine in Heusden-Zolder, Belgium, during Stephan Vanfleteren's exhibition.
© 2016 Daniela Duncan, All Rights Reserved.
Passion flower.
Amigos, I will still be posting to Flickr and checking your latest work, but now I'm becoming more active on Instagram - it's going to be the main social media platform for my images. It's where everybody is. Resistance is futile! Hope we can connect there as well:
Holy Week in Sicily:
"… There is no country in Sicily, in which
the passion of Christ does not revive
through a real
representation, in which people
lives or statuary groups do not
of the streets and squares the theater
of that great drama ... "
(Leonardo Sciascia).
“…Jesus said, “I love you as you are. And I love you too much to leave you as you are…”
(Chris Lyons).
The rites of Holy Week are present in Sicily with complexity of content and symbologies due to numerous influences, very present those due to the Spanish culture, dominating the island between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; in the mystery of the death and resurrection of Christ, it is attended by a popular culture, referring to ancient pre-Byzantine rites that originated long before those of Mediterranean Christian culture.
These ancient rituals represent the most significant moments of the Passion of Jesus Christ, described in the Gospels, from his arrest by the Romans to the Resurrection and are part of the Holy Week celebrations, together with the normal religious functions.
The rites of Holy Week unite Sicily in a single collective rite, an appointment highly anticipated by many Sicilian and non-Sicilian photographers, due to the covid-19 pandemic, now also for this year 2021, as for last year, these celebrations- collective rites will not be able to take place, so I created a "photographic showcase" to be presented on Flickr, composed of images belonging to events that belong to the Sicilian Easter rites, posted in past years; of each reportage presented, I only took "a few cards" more or less significant, some photos were originally posted in black and white, and as such I left them, other photos were posted in color, the latter I re-edited in black and white to conform them to a single photographic language; some photos differ within this black and white language, for having been subjected to a very marked vignetting, I have left them anyway, belonging to reportage characterized by that type of post-production.
Trapani: The Mysteries of Trapani, Good Friday, 2018
Marsala: procession of Good Friday, 2019
Enna: the Good Friday procession (la processione del Venerdì Santo), 2012
Militello Rosmarino: the Good Friday procession (la processione del Venerdì Santo), 2016
Bronte: the Good Friday procession (la processione del Venerdì Santo), 2017
Randazzo: the Good Friday procession (la processione del Venerdì Santo), 2014
Piana degli Albanesi: Easter Sunday (Domenica di Pasqua), 2014
Scicli: Easter Sunday, the Living Man - U' Gioia (Domenica di Pasqua, l’Uomo Vivo – U’ Gioia), 2017
la Settimana Santa in Sicilia:
"…non c'è paese in Sicilia, in cui
la passione di Cristo non riviva
attraverso una vera e propria
rappresentazione, in cui persone
vive o gruppi statuari non facciano
delle strade e delle piazze il teatro
di quel grande dramma..."
(Leonardo Sciascia).
“…Gesù disse: “Ti amo per come sei. E ti amo troppo per lasciarti come sei…”
(Chris Lyons).
I riti della Settimana Santa presentano in Sicilia una complessità di contenuti e di simbologie dovute a numerosi influssi, molto presenti quelli dovuti alla cultura spagnola, dominante nell’isola tra il XVI ed il XVII secolo; nel mistero della morte e della resurrezione di Cristo, si assiste nella cultura popolare, a riferimenti risalenti da antichi riti pre-bizantini che originano da molto prima di quelli della cultura cristiana mediterranea.
Questi antichi riti rappresentano i momenti più significativi della Passione di Gesù Cristo, descritti nei Vangeli, dal suo arresto da parte dei romani alla Resurrezione e fanno parte, insieme alle normali funzioni religiose, delle celebrazioni della Settimana Santa.
I riti della Settimana Santa uniscono la Sicilia in un unico rito collettivo, appuntamento attesissimo da molti fotografi siciliani e non, a causa della pandemia da covid-19, oramai anche per quest'anno 2021, come per l'anno scorso, queste celebrazioni-riti collettivi, non potranno attuarsi, ho così realizzato una "vetrina fotografica" da presentare su Flickr, composta da immagini appartenenti ad eventi che appartengono ai riti Pasquali Siciliani, postati negli anni passati; di ogni reportage presentato, ho preso solo "qualche tessera fotografica" più o meno significativa, alcune foto furono postate originariamente in bianco e nero, e come tali le ho lasciate, altre foto furono postate a colori, queste ultime le ho rieditate in bianco e nero per uniformarle ad un linguaggio fotografico unico; alcune foto differiscono all'interno di questo linguaggio in bianco-nero, per essere state sottoposte ad una vignettatura molto marcata, le ho lasciate ugualmente, appartenenti a reportage caratterizzati da quel tipo di post-produzione.
Wistman's Wood on Dartmoor, Devon. This is a very delicate habitat so I'm only taking photos from the very edge of the wood not venturing on to the moss covered rocks.
Like any good photographer I was searching for simplifying shapes and compositions. Very difficult. So what the heck, I'll share this showing all that chaos!!! Let me call it "Enchantment in the complexity"
It also happened to be my first image of the day. Sometimes that's the way it goes :-) Hope you enjoy.
Tangle of anthers and multi lobed stigma ensure pollen is dropped and collected when the gypsy moth visits its Latin American tropical rainforest host. Epiphyllum oxypetalum (Queen of the Night) is a member of the cactus family grown in my sub-tropical Gold Coast home garden.
The Tragedy of Uniformization: Toward a Dialogic of Freedom
In the image the figure of "Miss Chain sawing" embodies the height of "mutilating thought." What we see here is the transformation of an icon of emancipation into a force of reduction, which, under the guise of promoting an abstract freedom, proceeds with the methodical ablation of cultural specificities.
This dynamic illustrates what I call the "barbarism of unity": in wanting to carve up the world according to a single template, this "chainsaw" transforms the concrete richness of cultures into a lifeless transparency. The world, sliced into such thin pieces that it loses its substance, becomes the stage for a pathology of reason that, by seeking to simplify reality, destroys it.
The dialogic, far from being a mere concept, compels us to conceive of a unity that does not negate diversity. We are faced with an inseparable antagonism:
* The need for a freedom that serves as a shared value for all humanity.
* The vital necessity of preserving the roots, mores, and legacies that constitute the unique genius of every culture.
The suffering expressed in **image**—that feeling of a "hidden and insupportable thorn"—testifies to the fact that freedom imposed from the outside, without regard for the singularity of social fabrics, does not liberate: it alienates. To ensure the intellectual and spiritual richness of future generations, we must replace this "chainsaw" logic with an ethics of reliance. It is not a matter of rejecting the universal, but of reconstructing it from within diversity, so that every culture, while remaining itself, can participate in the co-construction of a pluralistic humanity. True emancipation does not lie in the transparency of the void, but in the density of the encounter.
**Suggested Title:** *The Dialectic of the Chainsaw: For an Ethics of Reliance Against the Barbarism of the Uniform*
Complex thinking is an epistemological concept proposed by the philosopher and sociologist Edgar Morin. It is not reduced to science or philosophy, but would allow their communication by operating the shuttle from one to the other[ref. needed]. The complex way of thinking can be useful in addressing organizational, social and political problems. Thought that confronts uncertainty can illuminate strategies in a world that has become uncertain. The first formulation of complex thought dates from 1982 in Morin's book Science with conscience: In the age of Miss Chain Sawing, city planning is no longer a local craft of building with place. It has become the sharp edge of a planetary dialogic: the chainsaw that simultaneously severs the old chains of rooted territories and carves new, standardized wounds into their living flesh. Globalization does not float above cities - it lands inside them, slicing neighborhoods into transparent fragments where local memory, biodiversity, and social thickness are rendered visible only as obstacles to flow. Yet the territory answers back. Every cut produces resistance, every standardized master plan generates its own underground metabolisms. Miss Chain Sawing is therefore not a villain nor a savior; she is the ambiguous operator of our time - the one who makes visible the wound through which territory and globalization ceaselessly remake each other. She cuts the chains of the old world... and the living fabric of the new one. A dialogic inquiry into how globalization slices cities into transparent pieces.
In the spirit of Edgar Morin's complex thought, the encounter between Miss Chain Sawing and urban planning reveals far more than a technical conflict over land use or zoning codes. It exposes a living dialogic - that ceaseless, creative, and often painful interplay between two antagonistic yet inseparable logics: the thick, rooted, auto-eco-organizing fabric of territory on one side, and the thin, accelerating, homogenizing flows of planetary globalization on the other.
Miss Chain Sawing is not a simple villain nor a heroic liberator. She is the ambiguous operator of our time. In one hand she wields the chainsaw that severs the heavy, rusted chains of obsolete structures, colonial legacies, and rigid hierarchies. In the other, the same blade slices through the living tissue of neighborhoods, memories, and ecological relations that still hold cities together. The image that haunts this inquiry makes the wound visible: Lady Liberty's severed head rests upon a body cut into transparent slices, countries rendered so thin they no longer conceal the global flows passing through them. Below lies the gaping skull - the death mask of urban diversity - while the saw works relentlessly. City planning, in its dominant contemporary form, has become the privileged instrument of this cutting.
Globalization does not hover abstractly above cities. It lands inside them, demanding legibility, liquidity, and speed. Master plans financed by international capital, smart-city platforms designed in distant laboratories, real-estate algorithms that treat neighborhoods as data points - all require territories to be rendered transparent. History fabrics are sélectionned into developable plots. into endless soy fields now turns living cities into portfolios of assets. Urban planning, when captured by this planetary grammar, ceases to be the art of composing with place and becomes the art of making place disappear into the smooth space of global circulation.
Yet the dialogic refuses one-way reduction. Territory answers back. Every cut produces its own counter-movements: informal settlements that re-weave social tissue, urban gardens that restore ecological memory, community land trusts that withdraw land from speculative transparency, tactical occupations that slow the chainsaw. These are not mere resistances; they are expressions of the territory's own auto-organizing intelligence asserting itself within the very wound globalization has opened. The part contains the whole: a single neighborhood that refuses to become transparent can reveal the entire logic of planetary urbanization and, at the same time, prefigure other possible cities.
This ongoing mutation transforms the very meaning of freedom. The liberty once symbolized by Lady Liberty - freedom of movement, of enterprise, of individual choice - is increasingly experienced in the sliced city as a new form of enclosure. For those displaced by redevelopment, for those whose daily rhythms are dictated by global real-estate cycles, for those whose cultural and ecological attachments are declared obstacles to progress, the promise of freedom rings hollow. A hidden thorn lodges in the collective flesh: the knowledge that the chains being cut were sometimes also the fragile bonds. that still connected people to place, to memory, to each other. This thorn makes us harsh - toward one another, toward the future, toward any symbol that claims to represent emancipation while participating in the slicing.
Miss Chain Sawing therefore stands at the crossroads of a possible metamorphosis. The same blade that wounds can, under different hands and different intentions, become the tool that carefully prunes dead wood while protecting the living cambium. Urban planning could shift from chainsaw to grafting knife - not erasing the dialogic tension between territory and globalization, but learning to work with it. This would require abandoning the dream of total transparency and total control. It would mean recognizing that every master plan is also a master cut, and that the health of a city lies in its capacity to maintain thickness, opacity, and unpredictability even while remaining open to planetary exchanges. fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pens%C3%A9e_complexe
The inquiry remains open. The saw continues its work. Whether it ultimately severs the last living connections or helps birth new, more complex forms of urban autonomy depends on how we inhabitants, planners, citizens, and thinkers - choose to grasp the handle. In the dialogic between territory and globalization, there is no final victory, only the permanent, uncertain work of recomposing what the blade has divided. Complexity characterizes the behavior of a system or model whose components interact in multiple ways and follow local rules, leading to non-linearity, randomness, collective dynamics, hierarchy, and emergence.[1][2]
The term is generally used to characterize something with many parts where those parts interact with each other in multiple ways, culminating in a higher order of emergence greater than the sum of its parts. The study of these complex linkages at various scales is the main goal of complex systems theory.
The intuitive criterion of complexity can be formulated as follows: a system would be more complex if more parts could be distinguished, and if more connections between them existed.[3]
As of 2010, a number of approaches to characterizing complexity have been used in science; Zayed et al.[4] reflect many of these. Neil Johnson states that "even among scientists, there is no unique definition of complexity – and the scientific notion has traditionally been conveyed using particular examples..." Ultimately Johnson adopts the definition of "complexity science" as "the study of the phenomena which emerge from a collection of interacting objects. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complexity
Edgar Morin (/mɔːˈræn/; French: [ɛdɡaʁ mɔʁɛ̃]; né Nahoum; 8 July 1921 – 29 May 2026) was a French philosopher and sociologist of the theory of information who has been recognised for his work on complexity and "complex thought" (pensée complexe),[9] and for his scholarly contributions to such diverse fields as media studies, politics, sociology, visual anthropology, ecology, education, and systems biology. He held two bachelors degrees, one in history and geography and one in law, and never did a Ph.D.[10] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar_Morin
Guarini's dome on the Capella della Sindone in the Palazzo Reale in Turin . Magnificently restored in the decades after the terrible fire of 1997.
I shot this from the bridge that crosses the stream below Cavell Lake. Standing waves from water flowing slowly over a submerged rock make a complex interference pattern from the light reflected from the sky and clouds. In the field, you have to look at reflections like this from exactly the right angle or you can't see them.
Amsterdam 2014
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I'm trying to portrait,
hmm..it's a feeling of being trapped,stuck.
A prisoner.
Here's the info
Strobist :
Vivitar 1/4 Softbox Zoom 24mm Waist High Right hand side, trigger by Ebay Triggers.
Sb800 + homemade snoot
1/16 zoom 50mm
Optical Trigger
D80 Timer
F6
1/50 sec
K mode 5000
So after my usual routine of preparation I used an early tan foundation.
Omg, went on like silk and, gave me just the base colour I feel fits my Italian roots... I actually would love to know if my DNA has a bit of Italian in it.. I certainly think so. Ciao.💜
This is one of my new favorite photos and I made it by accident. I selected about 10 different images that I wanted to load into layers to re-arrange. Well, as a slip of the finger would have it, I accidentally clicked “Merge to HDR”! Naturally, nothing was aligned and everything was ghosted. It made for a very interesting montage. So then I went into it and began to do more tweaking with various colors and contrasts until I liked it even more.
- Trey Ratcliff
Click here to read the rest of this post at the Stuck in Customs blog.